Ronald Illingworth

Ronald Stanley Illingworth FRCP (7 October 1909 in Harrogate – 4 June 1990 in Bergen, Norway) was a British born Yorkshireman and a paediatrician of renown. He was also a prolific writer, who wrote some 600 articles and at least 21 books, which were exceedingly popular and sold in large quantities. Illingworth was principally known for being largely responsible for introducing the science and practice of paediatrics to the UK in the early to mid-1940s.

Life
Illingworth was the youngest of three children of Ellen Brayshaw and her husband, Herbert Edward Illingworth, an architect. He was educated in Clifton House Preparatory School, then Bradford Grammar School. He achieved a scholarship in classics to read medicine at the University of Leeds. After a number of house appointments, Illingworth was appointed as a clinical pathologist in general practice at Great Ormond Street Hospital. Before the war he was awarded a Nuffield research studentship in Oxford from the Nuffield Foundation and in 1939 a Rockefeller research fellowship from the Rockefeller Foundation in 1939. During World War II Illingworth was conscripted into the Royal Army Medical Corps with the rank of Lieutenant Colonel in charge of medical divisions in several military hospitals

After the war, he took up the Rockefeller Research Fellowship and spent six months in New Haven, United States. He worked with the clinical psychologist and paediatrician Arnold Gesell at Yale University. He became interested in and studied Gessels theory on child development, known as Gesell's Maturational Theory. He studied it extensively, advocated for and taught it for the rest of his working life.

On his return to the UK he was appointed to a position as an assistant to the consultant paediatrician at Great Ormond Street Hospital. In 1947 he took up first chair of child health at the University of Sheffield, a position he held for 28 years until his retirement.

Illingworth was considered an excellent lecturer, who could deliver three or four lectures in a day, as a broadcaster he was equally persuasive. He was considered a constructive critic. The Nuffield Professor of Child Health, Otto Herbert Wolff who presented the James Spence Medal to Illingworth, noted at the presentation that as a writer, the "quality of his writing is crisp, clear and simple of phrase and not a word to spare".

In 1947, Illingworth married fellow physician Cynthia Redhead and together they had two daughters and a son. Their children all became physicians. The couple had six grandchildren.

Photography
Illingworth was considered a renowned photographer and was a Fellow of the Royal Photographic Society and a frequent lecturer at photographic societies. When he was a student Illingworth sold photos to the press to pay his living costs. During his career he built up a large collection of microscope slides, more than 4000, which he used for teaching.

Awards and honours

 * Medal of the University of Turku, Finland, 1974.
 * Aldrich Award of the American Academy of Pediatrics.
 * James Spence Medal, 1977.
 * Dawson Williams Prize of the British Medical Association.

Illingworth was also awarded honorary degrees from Sheffield and Leeds. In 1982 he was awarded the Freedom of the City of Sheffield.